For the last year or so the fertility crisis has loomed larger in political discourse. The impending issue across the Western world is sliding fertility rates. In almost every advanced country the ability to cheaply control your fecundity has combined with other social changes to drag down the total fertility rate. South Korea is worst affected, with a TRF of just 0.84, and the problem is an almost universal one. Britain’s has fallen to around 1.5, while since 2016 no EU country has maintained a TFR above the replacement rate, which keeps a population stable.
This presents novel societal and economic challenges. Economically, we have got used to the growth of the demographic sweet spot of the late 20th century. A drop in child mortality, combined with the post-war Baby Boom gave a glut of working-age people, massively in excess of those too old, sick, or young to work. The dependency ratio – the rate of non-workers to workers – was low meaning it was easy to generate the surplus necessary to care for them. Now we are headed to the opposite, and that means real challenges.
Our falling fertility, combined with an ageing population will push up this ratio. A top-heavy population pyramid means more workers for each person in retirement, making current levels of provision harder to sustain. More generally, without a ready supply of people, maintaining the same level of economic progress means massive productivity increases, something that we are already struggling with. It is an unprecedented situation. So far, most Western countries have sought to make up the gap with immigration, but this has its limits.
It is politically difficult, often unpopular and creating genuine issues of social cohesion – but it also seems like a one-shot boost. Migrant communities are not immune from the falling fertility rates, and nor are the countries they come from. In a generation or two as wealth, access to medicine and modern mores spread, what is currently a rich country problem could well become a global phenomenon. There simply will not be the immigrants to fill the hole.
On an individual scale too, the fertility crisis seems to matter. Research into the so-called “Baby Gap” suggests a real difference between the number of children people want and those they have. For some, this means unwanted childlessness, for others, having fewer than they might want. Whether we are concerned about national-scale problems or individual flourishing, this should be a cause for concern.
Countries across Europe have launched policies to encourage more children, from the heavily subsidised childcare of the Nordics to the family tax cuts of the French. In Britain, it has become an increasingly common talking point of the right, including the recent launch of Onward’s New Deal for Parents. At the same time, repeated endeavours are made around the other aspects of family policy, which encourages existing families to flourish. This is not simply the domain of the social conservatives either, with futurist policy wonks getting excited over the medical possibilities of things like artificial wombs, which could advance and extend female fertility. As Ruxandra points out, however, much of these seems to flounder with cultural forces seemingly outweighing economic pulls.
Far too often, however, the issue is sidelined for other reasons. Fertility and family policies are culturally coded as women’s issues, a tag which implicitly demeans them. The issues that inform these, from workplace rights to childcare are often dismissed as secondary problems. More than that, however, many of the proposed solutions, on both a cultural and economic level overlook the other half of the family equation. The role of men, fathers, in these matters is often overlooked, leading to both poorer policy proposals and engagement with the broader cultural milieu. To be effective, family policy should have as much to say about men as it does about women.
This is not to denigrate the unique role of women in this area, nor to swing into the online misogynist discourse around families (which is often bold on rights and reluctant about responsibilities) – but to acknowledge the realities of the world these policies interact with. Far too often, the discussions of how to raise the TFR largely sideline the perspective and incentives of fathers, leading to poorer discussions around child-bearing and nurturing. The conversation would be richer, and more effective, for taking this into account.
For example, much is said, especially by more socially conservative factions about the timing of childbearing. This has unmistakeably pushed back later for a variety of reasons, and so family formation comes much later in women’s window of fertility. This means a greater reliance on expensive medical interventions such as IVF, and for many the disappointment of quite simply running out of time. Yet though the lifestyle changes that have driven this – longer education time, more emphasis on professional life – are more noticeable among women, men have played their part too.
Asking around in one’s late twenties and early thirties it becomes abundantly clear about who is anxious about this. Female friends worry about settling down, their reproductive lifespan, and even things like egg freezing – often reinforced by female-focused fiction and lifestyle magazines. Men, on the other hand, are often nonchalant, driven by the conceit that whenever they might want kids there will be some nubile partner waiting, and the idea, instilled from early adolescence, that fecundity is on a hair-trigger, so easy that even the merest fumble might result in an accidental pregnancy. I’d wager most men never think about infertility until it is thrust into their personal circumstances, while for most women it is a constant nibbling worry.
We should perhaps also be asking about the things that men do that make child-having and child-rearing harder rather than easier. Studies show that the burden of childcare still largely falls on women – partly out of biological necessity, but as children grow older this is also informed by our personal and policy choices. In the workplace, for example, things like parental leave, flexible working and childcare funding still primarily feel like women’s issues. Men largely reap the overspill of concessions made by women campaigners. There should be more of a push to see these as the sorts of benefits men should push for when engaging with their employers, and which companies are incentivised to offer. In doing so we might end up with a system more mutually conducive to having more children.
The same is possibly true around family breakdowns. The causes and consequences of families breaking down is another topic for another day, but it is broadly clear that women bear the greater costs. They are more likely to be the ones left with the care of children, often without adequate financial contributions. Since child maintenance was moved from the courts to a bureaucratic process in the 1990s, the system has become rife with non-payment and evasion – arrears are now measured in the billions. Around forty percent of non-resident parents (predominantly fathers) in the maintenance system make no financial contribution to their children at all, while many more fail to pay what is fully due. It is easy to suspect that a proliferation of non-durable relationships, and women and families being left in the lurch after them, disincentivises having children and again this is at least as much of a problem driven by male behaviour as female.
The fertility crisis can be a hard issue to talk about politically. Exhortations to have more children for the national good can often be read as old-fashioned or pseudo-fascist. Framing it solely as a women’s issue can be particularly troublesome, an implied attack on freedoms that are both hard-won and much cherished. Yet the lack of children is a real issue and one unlikely to be solved by other means. The trend needs to be reversed quite soon and quite radically. Just as the drop is unprecedented, so too will be the recovery. As others have argued, the response is most likely multi-faceted, bringing together economic, cultural and medical solutions to what is a complicated and international issue.
It should also focus on the two-sided nature of the problem. The lack of births is not solely rooted in female incentives or female behaviour. Men are playing their part too, with personal and social choices. It is almost too obvious to write that families, on the whole, need fathers – but our policymakers and discourse often seem squishy about this. Really, when talking of birth rates and families we should also be thinking about how we shepherd in a generation of committed, caring and contributing dads enthusiastically becoming parents to multiple children and raising them. This is as much a policy challenge as encouraging women – and one which we should be keener to discuss.
Thank God a man said it so that I stop sounding insane/invite people to scrutinise my own life/personhood to find what's wrong with me and how high my standards are. If I read one more time about women delaying family making, I am going to gauge my own eyeballs out because all the women I know would love a partner and, I am sure, would sooner be the ones asking for kids. Men my age (29) meanwhile live an adorably delayed adolescence. I used to go on apps a lot, before I got tired of the futility of attracting male sexual attention (it leads to nothing that covers any of my needs), and there is no shortage of men 10-20 years older than me (in real life too, not just on the apps actually) who see me as the appropriate partner for them at that stage in their life. I am not saying there is anything wrong with age-gap relationships between adults, but I am deeply suspicious of men at that age going for women in my age bracket. What were they doing earlier, and why has society fed the illusion that younger women still find them attractive? Elon Musk doing a disservice for the average Joe.
This is a problem that can't be addressed within an autonomy-focused liberal framework. The only first-world country with sustainable fertility rates is Israel, which sees having children as a *duty* and an ethical good.
The rest of the West treats reproduction as a neutral question of personal choice - "it's good to have children and it's good to not have children" - which appears to be a guarantee of fertility collapse. Technocracy doesn't touch the sides.